Enhanced desktop and laptop machines are coming your way

Shares

Having been accused of neglecting its pro customers for the past few years, Apple has responded by announcing its “most powerful Mac ever” in the form of the iMac Pro.

This, as its name suggests, is an ‘all-in-one’ machine, and comes with with a 27-inch 5K display, up to to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation. Apple has also confirmed that it’s working on a new version of the Mac Pro, though there are no specs for this as yet.

Although it might look like an iMac (aside from the grey enclosure), the iMac Pro promises 80 percent more cooling capacity than a standard model, and supports up to 4TB of SSD storage and 128GB of ECC memory. There are four Thunderbolt 3 ports and 10GB Ethernet.

Designed for high-end graphics editing, virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering in particular, the iMac Pro certainly looks impressive, but with prices slated to start at $4,999 when it's released in December, it’s going to be beyond the financial reach of the majority of home users. The good news, then, is that the standard iMac has been given a welcome update.

Faster Kaby Lake processors (up to 4.2GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz) are now included and there’s support for up to twice the memory of the previous generation. All the 27-inch models now come with a Fusion Drive as standard, as does the top-end 21.5-inch version. The iMac now comes with Thunderbolt 3 ports, and there's now a £1,249 21.5-inch model with a Retina 4K display.

We should also mention that Apple has updated its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. The MacBook now features faster Kaby Lake processors up to 1.3GHz Core i7, with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz. There’s also up to 50 percent faster SSD, and support for up to twice the memory.

The updated 13-inch MacBook Pro, meanwhile, features Kaby Lake processors up to 3.5GHz Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.0GHz, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro goes up to 3.1 GHz Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz. There’s also a new entry-level 13-inch model that retails for £1,249.

All of these updated models are available to order now, and you can find out more on the Apple website.